02 — The Confessions and Conversion

The hinge of Augustine’s life and the book that recorded it: the conversion in the Milan garden in the late summer of 386, prepared by the preaching of Ambrose and consummated in the tolle lege (“take up and read”); and the Confessions, the thirteen-book work of memory, praise, and self-examination that he wrote a decade later as bishop — a new genre in the literature of the world, at once autobiography, prayer, and theology.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (pre-Schism West; “Blessed Augustine”)

The conversion of 386 is the event around which Augustine organized the whole understanding of his life, and the Confessions is the form he gave that understanding. This section treats the two together: first the garden at Milan — the figure of Ambrose, the mounting crisis, the child’s voice and the opened Epistle of Paul, the baptism at Easter 387 and the death of Monica at Ostia — and then the Confessions as a literary and theological work, the invention of a way of writing about the self before God that the West had not seen and would never forget.

Files in This Section

File Description
The Garden at Milan Ambrose of Milan and his preaching; the crisis of will; the tolle lege and the opened Romans (386); the baptism at Easter 387; the vision at Ostia and the death of Monica; the return to Africa.
The Confessions as a Work The Confessions (c. 397–401) as a new genre — confession as both praise and avowal; memory and desire; the philosophical Books 10–13 on memory, time, and Genesis; how to read it as theology rather than mere autobiography.

See Also

References

  • Augustine of Hippo. Confessions. Trans. Henry Chadwick. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.
  • Brown, Peter. Augustine of Hippo: A Biography. New ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.
  • Chadwick, Henry. Augustine: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986.